Beetlejuice Review

The screenplay is a mess and everyone involved knows it. Scenes arrive from nowhere, the rules of the afterlife change whenever a gag needs them to, and the Maitlands spend long stretches with nothing to do. Little of that matters, because the film is built as a haunted house you walk through rather than a story you follow, and the invention per minute is absurd. Burton and his designers imagine death as municipal bureaucracy, complete with a caseworker, a numbered queue and a handbook nobody can read, and the stop motion sandworms and the shrunken head civil servant have a handmade ugliness that has aged better than any polished effect from the same year.

Michael Keaton is on screen for roughly a sixth of the running time and reorganizes the entire picture around himself, playing Betelgeuse as a carnival barker with no impulse control. Winona Ryder gives Lydia a real interior life, which is why a generation of teenagers adopted her. Catherine O'Hara and Jeffrey Jones make the art world parents funny rather than merely obnoxious. The dinner party possession is the sequence everyone remembers and it is a fair measure of the film: no plot function, total commitment, unforgettable. Critics were enthusiastic in 1988 and the reputation has only grown since, with the standard reservation, that the writing cannot keep up with the design, still true and still beside the point.